The manhattan criminal courthouse. it s a surreal moment to go into that courtroom for the first time and see a former president of the united states who is simultaneously the world s greatest clown. those two things at the same time as a criminal defendant just spins things in your head that nothing else can. and the weirdness of that alone is your first hour in the courtroom. and it s in that first hour in the courtroom it s hard to take in anything other than the weirdness of donald trump. anticipating going into the courtroom, i was actually excited to do it. first of all, because i feel like as somebody who s written a trump book and has been covering this man, you know, from the beginning of his presidential campaign on, this kind of felt like a crescendo moment for him and for the country. and sit the only trial that he s going to face, so it definitely felt like a big moment and
And what was it like to witness the showdown between cohen and trump s defense lawyers during what turned out to be just a brutal cross examination. let s go back inside the courtroom with our msnbc and nbc colleagues. the jury has been waiting for this moment as long as we have. it s highly anticipated. they ve come face to face before in the civil fraud trial, but this is criminal. this is different. and he is the only one who can tie donald trump directly to this crime. he is the lynch pin of the prosecutor s case and he s given up the goods. he s put him from trump tower the oval office in a way that nobody else can. there s a few moments that really stood out. the fist moment when trump s lawyer, todd blanche, gets up and asks cohen did you call me a little crying [ bleep ] or whatever it was, and the judge immediately instructs them to approach as the d.a. s office raises an objection.
Welcome back to to prosecuting donald trump, witness to history, the reporting of the first ever criminal trial of the u.s. president. after years of covering stormy daniels and her claims that donald trump paid her to keep quiet about a sexual encounter so it would not come out before the 2016 election, what was it like to finally see her in person when she finally took the stand to testify against him, and after her dramatic, combative, sometimes shocking testimony, what was the conversation like among the reporters and spectators of the courthouse, and what about that bulletproof vest her lawyers say she wore. here are some more firsthand accounts from my colleagues who were inside the room. when she came in, all of us
Though i call it a detour, not a sideshow, but a detour, the case took a detour to explore what happened between her and donald trump, because you had to create the foundation of why that payment was made by michael cohen and how it, you know, got to the level of the business records being falsified. but you needed to have that dialogue, and what was really important is everybody likes to say that this is a paper case, but it is about humanity in some way, right? people s courage, people s involvement with others, extramarital affairs, you know, hush money payments. i mean, all of that is a very human thing, and she brought the humanity, i think, to the case. head the same reaction. i thought in many ways she did on cross because you got a better sense of her as a person. mm-hmm. and she was responding sort of naturally to questions that she didn t know it was coming up, and you really got a sense of her. and also i thought how smart she was. witty, quick. exactly. exactl
In the weeks since donald trump was found guilty of 34 counts in a new york courtroom, some of the wealthiest americans have come out to announce their support for him. steve, i really want to talk about this, because just in the last week, donald trump has this new crop of not even your average wall street business. i mean the top of the top most successful. coming out, throwing parties for him, supporting him, and they are even making arguments that are not true. i ve heard some of these guys say, when joe biden passed that last covid relief which killed us in terms of inflation, unemployment had already completely recovered. that was a lie. and an uninformed voter might not realize that. i m talking about the most informed voters are pushing trump lies on there in a